Tank like a girl

I managed to get the Northrend Dungeonmaster achievement plus my first heroic under my belt since I posted I would start doing PUGs. Kudos to WoW Armory, a wonderful plugin for WordPress. *points to her sidebar*

Normal Utgarde Pinnacle was alright, but I felt that I wasn’t on top of my game in the gauntlet. I was incredibly rage-starved and the fight lasted forever. Normal Oculus was just as painful to tank as it was to heal, and I don’t think I’ll want to go back on heroic anytime soon. Both of these runs were full guild-runs.

Heroic Nexus was done with 3 other guildies, plus a tree druid we pugged. Instance went fine, though I still want to strangle the hunter who had less than optimal pet control and pulled Commander Stoutbeard early. Full of confidence, I went into Heroic Violet Hold right afterwards, this time we pugged a paladin healer. I came out again with shattered confidence and one emblem of heroism.

As first boss we had Ichoron, whose mechanics overwhelmed most group members completely. It just didn’t work. There were gazillions of adds, I took so much damage, and it was frustrating as heck. It took us four tries to get Ichoron down. On one of the tries, the instance bugged out on us and we had multiple portals open at the same time. Even before the first boss we already had 7 portals open. Eventually we got Ichoron down, fought down waves and what second boss do we get? Zuramat the Obliterator. Again, no one (including me) knew how to deal with him and we wiped spectacularly. When we went back in and it started at portal 1 again, I just folded, as it was past 2 am my time, and I had been in the instance for well over an hour.

Very frustrating, as my last visit there as healer saw us out of the instance in 25 minutes, with Ichoron and Lavanthor as bosses. I will say I believe DPS was a huge issue. 1k DPS just doesn’t cut it in a heroic, no way. Is it that common to come out on top as prot warrior or am I still running with DPS that’s not quite there? Okay, likely a rhetorical question.

Summary: Fail guild groups are more soul-crushing than fail pugs.

I discovered AutoBar when I was looking for a better way to set up consumables aside from having a whole action bar devoted to consumables and such. I was looking for something more dynamic. Enter AutoBar. It’s a dynamic popup bar. It will only show the buttons you want it to show. I use Hearth, Healing Pot, Healthstone, Battle Elixir, Guardian Elixir, Buff Food, normal food, Quest items, etc. as example. In case of healing pots and bandages the best ones will be shown in the button. To use an old example, if I went into Tempest Keep, it would show the Nethergon pots, and outside would switch to normal pots instead. If you move your mouse on a button, a menu will popup and show what else you have got in your inventory.

I just find it extremely handy to have access to all consumables with a quick click.

AutoBar also offers the same concept for class bars. I don’t use that at all as warrior, but on my shaman I have a classbar for all my totems, for specific shaman buffs, for the elementals. Incredibly handy. For warriors you get buttons for stances, shields, Charge, and an emergency macro which I haven’t looked at yet.

You can use keybindings for every single button, and as I am a keyboard-heavy player, I have most of the important buttons bound.

All in all, it’s one of my must-have addons, I feel it makes managing consumables and even class-specific tasks a lot easier.